


18 Years

by Winchester_at_Heart



Category: Original Work
Genre: 9/11, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-10-19 15:33:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20659532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winchester_at_Heart/pseuds/Winchester_at_Heart
Summary: "It’s been 18 years, yet everyone still thinks I'm some sort of terrorist. I'm not. I swear. I wasn’t even born yet when the towers were hit. ""Birthdays are supposed to be this amazing thing, yet mine is just a mixture of heartbreak and pain every year. ""I pulled the fabric closer to my mouth, the thin fabric meant to mask my chest instead masking my lungs from the dusty air.""My mother was supposed to have died when I was 16. "On September 11th, 2001, the twin towers in New York City were bombed in a terrorist attack. In these short stories, four different people from four different walks of life discuss how the attacks shattered their families and perceptions of what family is meant to be.





	1. Description

"It’s been 18 years, yet everyone still thinks I'm some sort of terrorist. I'm not. I swear. I wasn’t even born yet when the towers were hit. " 

"Birthdays are supposed to be this amazing thing, yet mine is just a mixture of heartbreak and pain every year. " 

"I pulled the fabric closer to my mouth, the thin fabric meant to mask my chest instead masking my lungs from the dusty air." 

"My mother was supposed to have died when I was 16. "

On September 11th, 2001, the twin towers in New York City were bombed in a terrorist attack. In these short stories, four different people from four different walks of life discuss how the attacks shattered their families and perceptions of what family is meant to be.


	2. Lily

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s been 18 years, yet everyone still thinks I'm some sort of terrorist. I'm not. I swear. I wasn’t even born yet when the towers were hit.  
Middle Eastern girl ( Lily, 14) who everyone thinks is a terrorist talks about how bad 9/11 was on her family

It’s been 18 years, yet everyone still thinks I'm some sort of terrorist. I'm not. I swear. I wasn’t even born yet when the towers were hit. 

It took another four years before I was born. 

Plus, I'm not Islamic. I'm from Maine. Like, in America. I've lived in America my entire life and so have my parents. I'm not one of those kids who has to struggle past her overbearing parents because she's first generation of anything. I don't know how long I've been here. But, my friend Liv doesn't have to know when he family came from Germany, so I see no point in know the exact time my family moved here. 

Moved here from India by the way. I'm not from Islam. But everyone here sees my skin and is sure that I'm planning to blow up my school. 

I just want to start freshman year and be happy. It's been 18 years, yet no one here thinks anyone with my skin tone can be a good guy. 

But I'm here to prove that I'm a good person. Do you want to know who the scary ones are? 

The scary ones are the ones who threw rocks into my house when I was six because it had been ten years and all my white neighbors thought my parents were going to crash into another set of buildings. In reality, my mom was sick because of the baby growing in her and my dad was just out buying her pickles and black olives. She craved those the entire time she was pregnant with Liam, my little brother. 

No one in my family had any plans are trying to hurt anyone. 

The scary ones are those boys at my elementary school who took the scarf I had on because of the rain and tried to tie it where I couldn't breathe, taunting that if I wanted it so bad, I should keep it on. 

Those boys are the scary ones 

How is the waitress at the local wafflehouse who just wants to pay to finish school more scary than the guys who come into that waffle House every Friday night trying to get buzzed off of bad jokes, jukebox tunes, and breakfast sandwiches?

How is the girl struggling everyday to walk a shift after school less important and more scary than these boys who come in and harass her when she's just trying to do her job.  
And that girl at the waffle house, that's not me. That's my cousin. Her name is Rebecca; she's in college, and can barely afford it with the way things have been going. 

When she was younger, until she was 2 years old, her parents planned to save all of this money for her. They figured that they still had 16 more years before she started college and there was no way something could happen and they could lose everything between those two points, so they didn't save much those first 2 years. And what they did save was barely enough for books, much less tuition.

And then suddenly after September, my dad's business had to shut down. From September until January of the next year no one wanted to come in because they were convinced he was a terrorist. Because my dad looks different than the hordes of tourists who came in and out. 

Again, I'm from Maine. I'm not from this town in the Middle East where my head has to be covered just to go in public. Yes I wear scarves on my head sometimes, that's because I inherited my mom's frizzy hair and its tendency to look like a lion's mane if he's even a drop of humidity in the air. 

But I'm not a terrorist. I swear. And neither is my mom, dad, aunt, cousin, or anyone else.


	3. Daniel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Birthdays are supposed to be this amazing thing, yet mine is just a mixture of heartbreak and pain every year.  
19 year old Daniel was born 11 Sept 2000. His birthday has always been forgotten, swept under the rug because of 9/11

Birthdays are supposed to be this amazing thing, yet mine is just a mixture of heartbreak and pain every year. 

I never know how I'm supposed to act. I was born at 00:06 on September eleventh, 2000. My mother's labour was two days early and I can't help but wishing that she had given birth on time. 

Of course, my first 364 days of life were amazing. Everyone loved me, I was a cute little baby. 

And then the towers in New York were bombed. It was, of course, tragic, but there's a selfish part of me that always wonders why it had to coincide with my birthday. 

I just recently turned 19. 11 September, 2019. When you first see the date, you think of the twin towers in New York being bombed. When I see it though, I think of the anxiety that comes with becoming an adult and the additional fear of having to keep my special day such a minor thing since otherwise it would seem like I was greedy for the attention and taking advantage of the day. 

I know I'm not at fault, I didn't cause the bombing but I still feel guilty. I don't know why. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I'm excited in the same day that so many people are suffering. 

Or maybe the fact that thousands of people died on the day that my family had a smash cake made for me and while I was colouring with frosting, people were jumping out of windows in an attempt to survive. 

I got birthdays phone calls that never went through because people were desperately trying to get a hold of possibly dead family members. 

Survivors guilt, you could call it. 

No matter what, it's my birthday. 

It’s sort of hard to feel sad because it’s the day that I was born, but I still do feel awful. 

I always have to fill out forms at doctor's offices and stuff and put 9/11/00 as my birthday. When people hear that, they imagine that you can't be born on a day that bad. But even on such terrible days, even though it seems like everything stops, the world keeps going. It's weird.

On my birthday, there are always moments of silence.

I don't just accept this. I appreciate it. I appreciate how my birthday involves something bigger than myself, how it's a day that mixes family celebrations with national remembrances.

Over the years, my perspective has changed. 

At first, when I was too young, the birthdate didn't mean much of anything. Then there was a time when maybe I could relate to reaction that some peers had — how it was sad that I had to celebrate every birthday on 9/11.

But at some point, that spun in another direction. I have a connection to Sept. 11 that wouldn't be the same if I had been born Sept. 10 or Sept. 12 — a connection that is stronger than what many of my peers have.


	4. Logan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I pulled the fabric closer to my mouth, the thin fabric meant to mask my chest instead masking my lungs from the dusty air.  
Logan ( 30 now, 11 then ) talks about going to work with his dad on 9/11 and having to flee after the tower got hit.

I pulled the fabric closer to my mouth, the thin fabric meant to mask my chest instead masking my lungs from the dusty air.

My dad taught me that trick, the one that saved my life. He taught me to pull my shirt over my mouth and nose because we didn't always have an extra mask when he used the power saw in the garage. He also taught me to drench the fabric in water but I had already chugged it all, thus why I was in the situation I was in. 

I was in the North Tower when it collapsed. 

I don't remember why I wasn't at school that day. It's weird. I can remember some of the most specific details, but I've never been able to recall that one. 

I'll get this out of the way now. The doctors say I have PTSD and something called survivors guilt. It's just because of all the death and pain I saw that day. That and a few other things that I'll get to in a minute. 

I've always seen the way it played out as luck. Some people lived, some died. 

The night before, the New York Giants game in Denver had gone late into the night, which meant that a whole bunch of New Yorkers showed up a tiny bit late to work that morning, missing the final elevator up to the top of the North or South Tower. My dad's secretary, Lee, was one of these people. He loved sports and it basically saved his life. 

Some of my dad's orher coworkers survived because Roger Clemens was supposed to have been pitching for his 20th win at home with the Yankees on September 10. The game was rained out, but not before people had rescheduled their 8 a.m. client meetings for 8:45 instead. So they came in late, maybe getting coffee, maybe an extra few minutes of sleep. Those people survived. 

My dad's boss would have normally been at work by 8:30, but he stopped to get new eyeglasses on the way. He made it but 72 of the people he worked next to died that day. 

My dad was one of them. 

Sometimes, I feel like it was my fault. I didn't go to school that day, instead tagging along with my dad at work. I was eleven and took forever to do anything. 

So, my dad made me get up extra early so that we wouldn't be late. I was ready before he was, I was so excited. 

My dad gave me a bottle of water with breakfast since the coolers at work were down. 

I had to use the washroom and wanted to explore as well so I went all the way to the bottom floor to empty my bladder. 

As I was doing what I needed, the room shook. 

Hundreds of feet above my head, a plane had crashed into the tower. 

I got caught up in the rush of people pouring out of the doors. Smoke circled around my head and I kept my head tucked in my shirt. 

My dad didn't come out of the building. I don't know why, if he died helping people, tried to jump from a window or what, but I remember seeing his lifeless body in the rubble surrounded by his friends. 

When I close my eyes, I still see that sometimes. It's scares me.


	5. Erin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My mother was supposed to have died when I was 16.
> 
> Erin, mother to her very own teenager now, recalls how her rebellious streak saved her mother's life.

My mother was supposed to have died when I was 16.

I don’t know if she ever realized that. 

When I was young, I was an awful child. I skipped school, I went to parties, I caused trouble. And I never wanted to clean up my messes. My mother had to. She was a single mom with two kids. My older sister, Ann, was in college and I was new to my junior year of high school. 

My mother worked in a call center in New York. Our family lived in a small apartment in New Jersey, about an hour bus ride away, or 45 minutes by cab or car. Normally, my sister and I would take the car to school and drop my mother off to get a cab or the bus, but my sister took the car to college with her. 

I started having to get early to call a cab and get to my station to catch the bus by 7. My mother had to be awake and out the door by 6:30 to get her ride. Her bus left at 6:45.   
I hadn't been feeling well the night before and overslept one morning Once I did wake up, I didn’t check that my mom was awake. She was not. We were both late. I was moving even slower because I still felt sick , but finally, I did get out of the house, my mother rushing behind me. 

At 6:55. 

I wasn’t late for school. The school was about twenty minutes away, so I took a cab. My mother on the other hand clocked into work at 8: 12, after her shift had started. 

Confession time. I wasn’t sick. A few friends decided to go drinking Monday night and I was hungover. Normally, that wouldn't matter, but there was a lot in my stomach that I would later identity as anxiety that made me think maybe I was actually ill. 

At 8: 34, my mother got the call from my school that I had a fever and needed to be picked up, so she clocked back out and was in a cab to get me when the news of the attacks came on the taxi radio. The tower she was working in had been hit. 

I don’t know if she ever realized that she could have died. And sometimes, I think she was meant to. 

Now, 18 years later, I have a daughter of my own and my mother is gone. I love my daughter so much and miss my mother so much. 

As cliché as it sounds, almost losing her really made me appreciate my mother. 

I want to believe that I’m a good mother, and I try and remember how my party going ways saved my mother’s life when my baby girl does dumb things. She’s 14 now. I just can’t wait until she’s 17 and rebellious like her mom. 

And when she starts to act like I did, I’ll remember how too many drinks saved lives and I’ll keep her safe while she starts to destroy her liver.


End file.
